DOSE: T+ 0:00	3 shots	oral	Alcohol - Hard
T+ 1:07	2-3 g	oral	Mushrooms	(tea)
T+ 1:07	1 g	oral	Cannabis	(tea)
T+ 1:07	3 g	oral	Lotus/Lily - Nymphaea nouchali var caerulea	(tea)
T+ 1:07	3 g	oral	Kratom	(tea)
T+ 1:07		oral	Calea zacatechichi	(tea)
T+ 0:00		smoked	Tobacco

BODY WEIGHT:

155 lb

Mushrooms Save Another Life

Friday, November 23rd, 2012 - 8:19 PM

Last night I dreamt about heroin. I dreamt that I had a small amount of heroin at my parent’s house. I rolled it up into a joint and took it out on a bike ride to smoke by the arroyos. I woke up before I got the chance to smoke it, but when I fell back asleep the heroin joint was back with me. This time it was rolled into the end of a spliff. When I woke up this morning, I wanted to get high.

I haven’t done heroin in about 5 months now, but lately it has been on my mind again. I’m not sure why -- maybe it is the nostalgic season, or the heightened need for warmth and human comfort that the late autumn bring, but I have been craving the deep, empty, creamy ocean of an opiated haze. I stopped smoking weed about 3 months ago, and all I have had since then has been alcohol, nicotine and kratom. I know that I shouldn’t do heroin, I know that it is dangerously addictive, but I crave it nonetheless. It has been nearly two years since I have had a girlfriend, nearly one year since I last made love, and I feel that what I am really seeking may just be release. Whatever the cause, I woke up this morning with an intense desire to break out of my ordinary state of consciousness, even if only for a short time. I happen to have about a gram of weed saved that I bought in Eugene this summer, I don’t know why I have been hanging onto it but now I am glad that I have. I also have a few mushrooms and a small amount of kratom left. After thinking about it all day, I have decided that tonight is the night to experiment. What I am trying to achieve is a calm and relaxed, opiated and hallucinogenic psychedelic night of waking dream. Here is my plan: I will make a tea of mushrooms, marijuana and blue lotus. I will drink the tea and go on a bike ride, because I don’t like to trip in my parent’s house if I can help it, at least not while anyone else is awake. I’m going to ignore all of the advice that I have received about always tripping with a buddy, because I don’t have a buddy to trip with at this time – all that I have is my family, and they are not okay with my drug use. But I have tripped on mushrooms alone quite a few times before, and I am confident that I will be able to slake my need for an altered state without any danger to myself or others. I need to spend some quality time alone with my own mind. I will prepare the tea bag, and once my father has gone to bed I will begin to prepare the tea. I plan to make it my goal to ride my bike from my parent’s house to the beautiful Sandia foothills.

I want this act to be driven by intent, so here is my statement of intent for the night:

It is my will to achieve a beautiful and relaxed altered state, to explore the waking dreams and flights of mind that my altered state will kindle and to document my findings for sober reflection at a later date.

I have been feeling a lot of sexual guilt lately. For a number of months now, I have been getting off fantasizing about the dominance, control and abuse of young women, and watching all of the related porno. I am not sure what it is that turns me on about this particular expression of human sexuality lately, and I am ashamed of my appetite for fantasies of this nature. I feel very ashamed of ever indulging in any pornography at all, because I really do feel that it is an exploitative waste of time and life. I am concerned that this guilt and confusion that I have been feeling will have an impact on my state tonight, so I want to include in my statement of intent that it is my will to remain relaxed, and to have understanding, sympathy and love for everything that I have ever been or done in the past. In fact, due to the nature of some of my past trips, which have involved an uncomfortable mistrust and distaste for human nature, I want to include another variation on that last statement:

It is my will to have understanding, sympathy, empathy and love for everything that everyone has ever been or done in the past.

I will write these statements onto a paper and carry them with me tonight.

9:11 P.M.

As I am feeling slightly nervous about tripping after a 4 ½ months entheogen-hiatus, my first mind-altering substance of the night will be a glass of trusty old Evan Williams Kentucky Whiskey, on the rocks, which I am preparing now.

10:18 P.M.

I combined Calea zacatechichi, Blue Lotus, Kratom, Ground Mushrooms (about 2 or 3 grams, estimated), ginger shavings, nutmeg shavings, chai green tea, and Holy Basil and made a 15 minute infusion. I boiled ½ tbsp butter a little half & half and added a cup of the still steaming infusion. I dunked a tea bag containing about 1 gram of cannabis and let it steep for about 10 to 15 minutes before adding honey, more butter and another cup of the tea. It is ready to drink. I am going to drink this infusion and then set out on a bike ride, I will check in again and record my experiences in a few hours.

4:02

First of all, the tea was delicious. Relaxing, gentle and warm aroma of cannabis and a creamy, dreamy, and very cloudy texture. I drank two cups and got ready to go out on a bike ride, only to find that my front tire is completely flat. At first this put a slight damper on the always tenuously dark mood that overcomes me when I trip, but I then decided to go out on foot instead. I packed up and got in the car, and started driving east with the vague notion of walking along the Tramway bike path, which runs for miles north and south along the very foot of the foothills of the Sandia mountain range. Pretty soon, I started to feel like it would feel even better to longboard the path, and I headed back to pick up my board. [Erowid Note: Driving while intoxicated, tripping, or extremely sleep deprived is dangerous and irresponsible because it endangers other people. Don't do it!]
I started to feel uncomfortable early on, and thinking that it would help to smoke my pipe (tobacco), I loaded and sparked a bowl. It did relax me, but I believe that the MAOIs potentiated the mushroom trip into a higher degree of tripiness. I got my l board and started out for Tramway again. Driving was becoming increasingly uncomfortable, and as is usual for me at the start a mushroom trip, I started to focus in on everything that I see as a shortcoming of myself, on all of my social blunders and faux pas. Remembering my statements of intent, I formed a mantra to halt the flow of uncomfortable and unproductive thought patterns and the associated psychosomatic sensations. The mantra was a simple statement: “I forgive myself for anything and everything that I have ever been or done in the past.” I began to repeat this mantra faster and faster, increasing the intensity of the invocation of the spirit of forgiveness the more that I noticed any increase in the intensity of the fear, shame, hatred, and pessimistic, self-effacing, negative, and cynical thought patterns. I felt that with the repetitive utterance of these words I was defeating an evil inside of myself and inside of all of humanity, a sort of universal principal of evil. I felt that I was washing away all of the sins of myself and of the whole human race in the baptism of this sacred statement of forgiveness.

With every utterance of the mantra I felt a relaxation, and unwinding, a relief, a correction of some uncomfortable unconscious pattern of breath and heart rate. I was presented with a barrage of the most vile images, ideas and thoughts that one can imagine, but with every wave of negativity and shame I only increased the volume of my invocation. I was feeling wave after wave of euphoria with every fresh forgiveness. I felt that I was reprogramming and rearranging the very hardware of my entire nervous system, like I truly was gradually washing myself clean and remaking myself anew with every repetition. All of the shame of my past presented itself before me and all of it was washed away in forgiveness. I felt that I was more than myself at that moment, I felt that my mind was an expression of the whole of the universe, that the universe is made of the same stuff as our minds, and that by forgiving myself for anything and everything that I have ever been and done, the universe was also forgiving itself for everything that it has ever been and done in the past. I started to feel that I am an expression of the function of all of history up to this point, and that by forgiving myself in this new moment, history itself was forgiving every atrocity, every degradation, and every horror that has ever been committed by any of it’s denizens -- that is, by all of the matter in the universe, and especially by any form of life in the universe, and especially by human life, and especially by my own human life.

I parked the car by a park and lay the seat back to watch the most beautiful and most inexplicable patterns and images flash across my eyelids. Things like mustaches wearing shiny stovepipe hats and walking on long stilts… or were they red lips on stilts with pencil mustaches above?… or were they just reddish giraffe? The chaos of beautiful, swirling, shifting geometric arrangements of color was occasionally organized into such nonsensical-but-definable and recognizable juxtaposition of images. I went through a period of fear and discomfort, feeling afraid to leave my car, wanting to return to my room, and I told myself that this trip was my trial, that I would separate myself from my family so that I could become myself and that I would not give in to fear and weakness, because I am a man. Eventually I decided to leave my car and walked across the park to take a leak under a bridge at the other end. As soon as I set foot out of the car I felt amazing, and I was so glad to be out experiencing the beautiful night rather than lying down somewhere being victimized by my own mind. The park was a dream and I walked through it in somewhat the same way that I would if I had been dreaming, taking it in and appreciating it but accepting that it was all somehow a part of my own mind. I made it my goal to walk to Tramway and I started east through the expensive neighborhoods of the foothills.

The walk was amazing, but I did not appreciate the bike trail as much as I had anticipated due to an overabundance of traffic and lighting. I always feel that the world is so populated by perverts when I am tripping in a public place at night, and I tend to suspect the driver of every car that passes of some form of treachery or other. To ease my mind, I put on my headphones and started playing a recording of Robert Anton Wilson’s TSOG talks, because I am always put at ease by RAW’s tendency to attempt to cause his listeners to give up their ridiculous beliefs, rather than try to propagate some ridiculous belief of his own. That being said, the TSOG talks are beautiful and impressive, and in many ways deeply terrifying. I was first struck by the beauty of RAW’s communication, the slight wavering of his voice and his careful word choice and intonation so brilliantly expressive. Listening to his talks, I feel as if I am having a much needed conversation with an old and wonderful friend. The information was presented in an unsettling way, and as a whole the talks inspire a suspicion that there may be an intent behind the institutions of human power that is much larger and better organized than most of us would ever guess – a thought that should inspire fear in anyone who might fall under the category of ‘undereducated masses’, and I count myself among them...

January 19th, 2013

November 23rd of last year was a turning point in my life. After a year of depression and pessimism, things started to look up for me after that night. I began reading about current events and injustices during my spare time, I began speaking with my friends again and coming back out of my self-imposed isolation, I signed up for university classes in the spring, I started going out more and ended up meeting a couple of beautiful and brilliant women who helped me to heal the sexual harm that I had been causing myself. I made a new friend who has quickly become a soul mate, and we continue to inspire growth in each other every day. I did watch porn again, and I did use heroin again, but I have since moved beyond a need for either of those narcotic mind-states. I was lucky that this trip turned out to be so healing for me, and it came at exactly the right time in my life. Without any hyperbole, I can say that the mushrooms saved my mind and my life.

Love Always

Exp Year: 2012	ExpID: 99010
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 22
Published: Apr 11, 2018	Views: 753
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Mushrooms (39) : Public Space (Museum, Park, etc) (53), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Sex Discussion (14), Glowing Experiences (4), Combinations (3)